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Form Without Matter, Was an Essay in the Philosophy of Perception Written in the Medium of Historiography

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Form Without Matter, Was an Essay in the Philosophy of Perception Written in the Medium of Historiography View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilPapers Sympathy in Perception Mark Eli Kalderon i I focused at intervals as the great dome loomed up through the smoke. Glares of many fires and sweeping clouds of smoke kept hiding the shape. Then a wind sprang up. Suddenly, the shining cross, dome and towers stood out like a symbol in the inferno. The scene was unbelievable. In that moment or two I released my shutter. Herbert Mason Contents Preface iii Acknowledgements ix 1 Grasping 1 1.1 The Dawn of Understanding ...................... 1 1.2 Haptic Perception ............................ 4 1.3 The Protagorean Model ......................... 10 1.4 Assimilation ............................... 13 1.5 Shaping .................................. 21 1.6 Active Wax ................................ 27 1.7 A Puzzle ................................. 30 2 Sympathy 37 2.1 Haptic Metaphysics ........................... 37 2.2 The Dependence upon Bodily Awareness ............... 39 2.3 Against Haptic Indirect Realism .................... 44 2.4 Sympathy ................................. 46 2.5 Sensing Limits .............................. 52 2.6 TheStoics ................................ 58 2.7 Plotinus .................................. 61 2.8 The Principle of Haptic Presentation ................. 69 3 Sound 79 3.1 Moving Forward ............................. 79 3.2 The Berkeley–Heidegger Continuum ................. 82 3.3 The Bearers of Audible Qualities .................... 87 3.4 The Extent of the Audible ....................... 91 3.5 TheWaveTheory ............................ 95 3.6 Auditory Perspective .......................... 101 3.7 Phenomenological Objections ..................... 104 i ii CONTENTS 4 Sources 117 4.1 The Heideggerian Alternative ..................... 117 4.2 The Function of Audition ........................ 118 4.3 Sources and the Discrimination of Sound ............... 121 4.4 Sympathy and Auditory Presentation ................. 125 4.5 Listening ................................. 131 5 Vision 137 5.1 The Biranian Principle ......................... 137 5.2 The Persistence of Extramission .................... 139 5.3 The Truth in Extramission ....................... 141 5.4 Looking .................................. 152 5.5 Sympathy and Visual Presentation ................... 156 6 Realism 165 6.1 Grasping and the Rhetoric of Objectivity ............... 165 6.2 Perceptual Objectivity ......................... 166 6.3 Kantian Humility ............................ 173 6.4 Bergson contra Kant ........................... 176 6.5 Perceiving Things in Themselves .................... 178 Preface The present essay is an unabashed exercise in historically informed, speculative metaphysics. Its aim is to gain insight into the nature of sensory presentation. Allow me to explain why it should be historically informed and in what sense the metaphysics developed herein is speculative. One of the fundamental issues dividing contemporary philosophers of percep- tion is whether perception is presentational or representational in character (see, for example, the recent collection devoted to this topic Brogaard 2014 and Camp- bell and Cassam 2014). To claim that perception is presentational in character is to claim that it has a presentational element irreducible to whatever intentional or representational content it may have. So conceived, the object of perception is present in the awareness afforded by the perceptual experience and is thus a con- stituent of that experience. Representationalists deny that perception has such an irreducible presentational element, claiming, instead, that the object of perception is exhaustively specified by its intentional or representational content. If there is indeed a presentational element to perception, then, according to the represen- tationalist, this is because sensory presentation is either reducible to the exercise of an intentional or representational capacity or otherwise essentially involves the exercise of such a capacity (see, for example, Chalmers 2006; McDowell 2008; Searle 2015). There are two aspects of this debate. On the one hand, there are arguments on one side or the other urging that perception must be conceived in presentational or representational terms. One the other hand, there is a more pos- itive, constructive aspect, where, taking for granted one’s preferred conception, one goes on to develop detailed theoretical accounts of perceptual experience. Representationalists have been more active in this latter task. And unsurpris- ingly so. For suppose one took sensory presentation to be an indispensable aspect of perceptual experience and further held, in a Butlerian spirit, that it was reducible to no other thing. What positive account could one give of sensory presentation, so conceived? Since it is irreducible, no positive account could take the form of a reduction. So no causal or counterfactual conditions on sensory representations, understood independently of perception, could be jointly necessary and sufficient for the presentation, in sensory experience, of its object. One might specify the iii iv PREFACE relational features of presentation in sensory experience, but not much insight into the nature of sensory presentation is thereby gained. The tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics would seem not to leave one much to work with, at least in the present instance. So it can seem that if one maintains that perceptual experi- ence involves an irreducible presentational element, all that one can do is press the negative point that sensory presentation, an indispensable element of perceptual experience, is reducible to no other thing. I believe that perception has an irreducible presentational element. And yet I hoped to learn something positive about the metaphysics of sensory presentation. If there was, in fact, anything further to be learned, I could not limit myself to the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics. The present metaphysics is histori- cally informed, at least in part, as a result of looking for tools more adequate to the task at hand. There is a real question about how such borrowings should be understood, if they are not simply an invitation to roll back philosophical thinking about perception to some earlier period. Before we are in a position to address that question, let us first address two additional motives to look to historical material in thinking about the nature of sensory presentation. Putnam (1993, 1994, 1999) has described the present metaphysical orthodoxy in the philosophy of mind as “Cartesianism cum materialism” (compare Merleau- Ponty’s 1967 related charge of “psuedo-Cartesianism”). While it is easy to find dissenters to either the Cartesian or materialist elements of that orthodoxy, it is equally easy to appreciate the way in which Putnam’s description is apt. That it is apt, shows that, despite its technical sophistication and being informed by twenty-first century psychology, contemporary philosophy of mind is still working within a seventeenth century paradigm. After an initial collaboration (Hilbert and Kalderon, 2000), as I continued to work on color and color perception (Kalderon, 2007, 2008, 2011a,b,c), it became increasingly clear that I was defending an anti- modern conception of color and perception. The conception of color defended was anti-modern in that the colors were in no way secondary,but mind-independent qualities that inhere in material bodies. The conception of color perception was anti-modern in that it was not conceived as a conscious alteration of a perceiv- ing subject but rather as the presentation of instances of mind-independent color qualities located at a distance from the perceiver. The anti-modern metaphysics provided an additional motive to look to historical, and in particular, pre-modern sources. Doing so was a means of self-consciously disrupting habits of mind incul- cated by the modern paradigm that has reigned for four centuries. There is a third additional motive for the turn to historical sources, one flowing from the methodology pursued in the present essay. Given our presupposition that sensory presentation is irreducible, and leaving to one side what form a positive account of sensory presentation could take if it is not, indeed, a reduction of some v sort, how are we to proceed? How can one gain insight into the nature of the irreducible presentational element of perceptual experience? My thought, not at all original, was to proceed dialectically,by considering puzzles about the nature of sensory presentation. As it happens, there are a number of historically salient such puzzles that are useful for a metaphysician proceeding dialectically to consider (for a detailed historical discussion of at least one of these see Kalderon 2015). Moreover, many of these puzzles are pre-modern though have been obscured by the prevailing modern paradigm. It can often happen, in the course of dialectical argument, that the insights of one’s predecessors are not only preserved but transformed. Thus, it can happen that a respected predecessor was right to hold a certain opinion but only on an understanding as of yet unavailable to them. That is one way, at least, in which the insights of our predecessors may be transformed even as they are preserved in the course of dialectical argument. This bears on the question of how such historical borrowing are to be understood. There is no real possibility of rolling back philosophical thinking to the fifth century
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